Does Ed Matter?

I am always hesitant to write postings about education for multiple reasons. For one, I spend my days grappling with state educational policies supportive of college preparation and improving the graduation rates of low-income, first-generation and students of color. Secondly, I believe the tool of education is marginal in bringing about short-term social change, as a change in improving worker’s wages, or guaranteeing citizens free healthcare. In fact, most of the arguments supportive of education are mainly concerned with its potential to bring about long-term social equality, rather than any short-term tangential results. However, I believe there are short-term benefits to education that are vital to the well being (socially, psychically, and economical) of the individual. the education of It is this unique characteristic of education that make it difficult to determine

The limits of these perspectives are evident in two op-eds focused on the “crisis” in education and featured in the New York Times this past week. Although I believe overall educational opportunities are diminishing by the minute, I put crisis in quotations to emphasize how the nature of the educational “crisis” has historically affected inner cities and rural communities disproportionately.

In the first article to appear this week, Bob Herbert rightly acknowledges how the U.S. needs to invest in the educational infrastructure. Herbert’s evidence of the broken U.S. education system is the current high school dropout rate and the growing ignorance among young people. In fact, the test of ignorance comes from students’ lack of rote memorization of U.S. historical facts, such as not knowing that the Bill of Rights guarantees the separation of church and state. I don’t know if this has many short-term implications considering that young people are growing up in a time where these two divisions are blurred. This might be a reflection of our contemporary political climate.

By using knowledge of U.S. historical fact to test the state of our educational system, Herbert is in essence evoking the notion of education as a nation-building project, which forges a common understanding of democratic principles. I believe this is where the short-term potential of education is apparent; in its ability to muster.

Edward B. Fiske’s op-ed piece Friday morning provides a summary of the lasting legacy of a nation at risk is the advent of ed-reform upon ed-reform. Of course, the thought that education reforms are relatively new phenomena is false. The entire 20th century witnessed the expansion of compulsory education in the U.S., and multiple thoughts as to the purpose of education and which populations are to be served by the system.
I appreciate Fiske’s piece for what Herbert’s article ignores, namely that rote memorization is not indicative of the quality of an education system. This is exactly what is our current experience under NCLB.

Both authors differ in how they treat our current economic downturn in relationship to educational opportunities. Herbert relies on the threat of international economic competition to garner reader empathy and action. Subsequently, it plays on American \ fears of losing its economic dominance in the world. Erroneously, I would say that
Herbert is mistaken. A college degree is not crucial for a middle class lifestyle, but that a master’s degree is the only guarantee of it.